Success Story / Scooter GmbH / Electronic invoice processing

A good performance

The mood on the tire market is not good. For years, the loss of market shares is putting pressure on tire retailers. Yet even if one is one of the cheapest on the market, money can still be made with car tires, as shown by the example of the online tire retailer GoodTires. The discounter is an online shop of the Rendsburg company Scooter Autoservice GmbH.

During the season-related tire change in spring and fall, business peaks for the tire delivery of GoodTires.de. There is a constant stream of haulers and package service transporters. Without stopping, they bring the black tires and pick them up again. Those are systematically sorted into the accurate high racks of the new company building constructed in 2013. Behind the tire-black front, the owner and manager Andreas Fürst operates the Internet business next to a car parts wholesale and an auto shop. The side-business soon became the main-business, as since it was introduced over Ebay, Amazon, Idealo and numerous own online shops, the online tire retail went literally through the roof. During the expansion, Fürst decided to radically automate all the processes of the new work shop and in the back office.

On the right track

At first, the master mechanic Fürst thought of a digital archive. The reasons are the mountains of paperwork that has not only to be processed, but also stored for 10 years. On good days, 300 invoices from suppliers pile up in the mesh boxes of the accounting department, on very good days up to 500. The result of this invoice processing process is four shelf meters full of standard file folders, around 50 per month!

Success Story / Scooter GmbH / Electronic invoice processing

Digitalizing the invoice processing itself was not intended by Fürst at this point. After he presented the mesh boxes full of invoices -with some numbering more than 350 pages - to a distribution partner of JobRouter AG, it became clear that while an archive system will create space, the invoice processing has to be brought on the right track first.

The item-exact checking of the incoming invoices alone occupies multiple full time employees and slows the throughput times down. A critical factor in the highly competitive online business, that can affect customer reviews. In the end, Fürst decides on automated, secure and significantly faster processes including a digital archive solution and greenlights the workflow management system JobRouter®.

Andreas Fürst

„If a company grows as strong as ours, the capacity limitations are quickly reached. More and more orders mean more and more employees. At one point the work has to be reorganized. With the workflow management system JobRouter®, we are well positioned for further growth. With a user interface that logical, training is not really necessary. All locations are connected to JobRouter®, and we have many more ideas on how to automate processes and how to facilitate our work."Quote Andres Fürst, manager of Scooter Autoservice GmbH

High speed invoice processing

Fürst explains why the invoice processing of the tire trade is this complex: "Tires are a special world that is not solely based on article numbers." This means, EAN codes have to be read, the age of the tires and the label values of the tire industry. Furthermore, the invoices of the around 450 domestic and foreign creditors are structured completely different. The challenge is to identify the relevant individual items to allow the invoice reader SmartFix to correctly interpret them.

Since the introduction of the workflow management system JobRouter®, an invoice of the previously mentioned size now only takes 20 minutes to read, check and process. JobRouter® compares the order data found in the system with the verified incoming invoices. Automatic, complex verifying processes are automatically run in the background, including bank reconciliation for suppliers using automatic debit transfer.

Success Story / Scooter GmbH / Electronic invoice processing

Colored in the traffic light colors red, yellow and green, only the items and invoices that have to be manually corrected and released are shown to the employees. Duplicate orders, shipments and invoices are filtered by the system to be verified, the same for discrepancies between amounts ordered and invoice amounts or discrepancies in quantity or price. In the end, the accounting records are automatically created correctly in DATEV format for the tax accountant and transferred.

Connecting the interfaces - the databases with the order data, the ERP business solution for the automobile trade - is completely unproblematic, as JobRouter® can be seamlessly integrated into any system environment. In the end, all digital documents are stored in JobArchive, which fulfills the initial goal intended by Fürst completely. This matched Fürsts passion for automation and technical finesse that can also be found in the nearly fully-automatically working tire assembly and the innovative vehicle reception station.

The advantages of the electronic invoice processing with JobRouter® at one glance

Reduces throughput times to a minimum

saves labor and administration costs

ensures deadlines, allows using trade discounts

reliably recognizes duplicates, differences and deviations

allows accessing instances and documents at the touch of a button

reduces the need for paper, material costs, storage space

archives all documents of a company, audit-proof

is future-proof, as the processing of data and documents is indefinitely scalable.

"Expectations fully met!"

Manager Fürst considers his expectations towards the workflow management system JobRouter® fully met. "The kicker" for Fürst is how the data is read from the most different documents and then made usable. The time of poring over folders is over. Questions about the state of an order or a shipment can be resolved at the touch of a button. "The employees on all sites approach important tasks more proactive and timely, they are much more productive," said a delighted Fürst who appreciates the integrated escalation level management. What has to be done by whom until when? If a task was not processed as planned, the supervisor automatically receives a message and can instruct his team.

For strategist such as Fürst, the purchase of the workflow management system JobRouter® a clear calculation exercise. "I compare the purchasing costs with the personal costs for additional employees. The result shows that JobRouter® pays off in two years."

Success Story / Scooter GmbH / Electronic invoice processing

Already now, between 60 and 80 percent of time - depending on the season - is saved during the invoice processing. And this is good that way, as the 30 man team at the companies headquarter in Rendsburg has to stem a rapid growth. The online retailer GoodTires.de that first started via the auction site Ebay was named first in the price category two times in a row in the last two years by the rating site Testsieger.de. There is still room to improve for businessmen like Andreas Fürst, who want to convert the signs of the time - and the best available technology - into business success.

Short profile Goodtires.de / Scooter Autoservice GmbH

The online tire retailerGoodTires belongs to the Scooter Autoservice GmbH founded in 1997. Headquarters of the company is in Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein. The managing partner is Andreas Fürst, co-partner is Andreas Schmidt-Grünberg. A new company building was constructed in 2013, where a car parts wholesale and a high-tech auto shop can be found next to the tire warehouse. Three more branches operate in Neumünster. There are a total of 50 employees over all four locations, 30 of them at the headquarters in Rendsburg. Currently, GoodTires is the tire shop with most sales on the auction site Ebay, where Fürst started his tire discounter in 2009.